Wizards at War, New Millennium Edition (27 page)

“One thing at a time,” Sker’ret said. “We’ve got to go down there and do some research.” He was looking through his own manual. “I can set up short-range transits for us from here to the surface in such a way that they ought to be undetectable. You’ll want to look over my shoulder to make sure I don’t miss anything,” Sker’ret said to Ronan. “But what then? We’re going to have to walk some places. We’re going to have to go into the Yaldiv cities and pass unnoticed. And as you say, the usual invisibility doesn’t seem to be enough. These creatures, the warrior-foragers anyway, have a better-than-usual sense of smell, as well as what looks like an innate sensitivity to force fields. Merely visual disguises aren’t going to do the job.”

Filif suddenly shook every frond he owned, and all his berries blazed. “Well, it’s plain that there’s no such thing as coincidence,” he said. “Have a look at this.”

A moment later, Kit found himself looking at another Nita. He glanced over at the original one. Her jaw had dropped.

“How does it look?” Filif said. And, bizarrely, his voice sounded like Nita’s.

“Wow!” Kit said.

“Does it feel right?” Filif said. He held out an arm.

Kit pinched it experimentally. “Yeah…”

“Does it smell right?”

“I wouldn’t answer that if I were you,” Nita said. She got up and went over to Filif, looking at him up close and very carefully. “It’s almost like a mirror,” she said.

“It’s a
mochteroof,
” Filif said.

The word was plainly in the Speech, but Kit had never heard it used before. “Some kind of seeming?” he said.

“About halfway between a seeming and a full shape-change,” Filif said… and once again the voice was Nita’s. “It’s less likely to leave you with the side effects that a complete change would. Yet it looks and feels solid. It’ll pass all the common sensory tests—touch, smell, taste.”

Kit was impressed. “When’d you start work on this?”

“When I started to realize I didn’t want to look, sound, or smell too much like a vegetable,” Filif said, “in a world full of herbivores.”

Nita suddenly looked embarrassed. “Uh. Sorry. We, uh—”

“Don’t apologize!” Filif said. “I found soon enough that plants on your world aren’t like they are on mine. And I got caught up on my research and discovered you were built to eat the way you do. Just look at your teeth! Anyway, when Roshaun and Sker’ret and I started going out visiting places with Dairine, I built myself a wizardry that was mostly a strictly visual illusion. It worked well enough when we first went to the mall, but it failed when I got distracted. So afterward I took the work I’d done and used it to construct something more robust—an overlay that wasn’t as taxing as a full shape-change but could still cope with being touched, and would react properly to all the other senses.”

Nita leaned close to Filif and pushed his/her bangs aside to stare at his/her forehead. “What?” Kit said.

“He’s even got my zit!” Nita said, straightening up. She sounded rueful but impressed. “You’ve really been working hard on this, Fil.”

“I noticed you looking at it,” Filif said, “and inserted it. The image self-updates when you do that. Otherwise, it just runs true to your last memory of a given template. Here, look at this.”

And suddenly the other-Nita turned into Carmela.

Kit made an exaggerated choking noise and fell over. “Oh, no,” he said. “Not her, not here! No way.”

“What’s the matter?” Filif said, sounding confused. “Did I get something wrong?”

Nita snickered. “No,” she said, and got up to stretch. “I’d say you got it just right.” She looked at Kit in amusement. “No wonder ‘Mela spends so much time bugging you! You give her these huge reactions. If you didn’t make such a fuss, she wouldn’t have nearly so much fun.”

Kit rolled his eyes. Filif went back to being a tree again, and Ronan, too, stood up and had a stretch. “All right,” he said. “So all we need to do now is decide where to start looking for the Instrumentality.”

Kit looked up at Ronan. “You saw where Ponch brought us out. I think we should have some faith in his talent, and start our work near there. One of the cities isn’t too far from our landing site.”

“We’ll have a lot less trouble getting lost in the crowd where there are a lot more Yaldiv,” Nita said. She touched Sker’ret’s rotating globe with one finger. The view of the planet in her own manual and in the larger display expanded to show the cities’ locations. “Yup, that’s the bigger of the two cities.”

“So all we have to do now is tailor versions of Filif’s
mochteroof
for ourselves,” Sker’ret said.

Ronan nodded slowly. “Right you are,” he said. “And since it looks like the Yaldiv are diurnal—a lot of them go out of the city to work in the forest in the daytime, then come back when it starts to get dark—when they do, we’ll go back in with them.”

“Makes sense,” Sker’ret said. “We’ll need someplace near our target city to use as a base, though, somewhere to put up the pup tents. A cave or something similar.”

“My very thought,” Ronan said. “I’ll go see what I can find. Back in a tick.”

He vanished.

Nita stood looking down at the planet’s surface, while off to one side Sker’ret started laying down his short-transit routines, a lacy filigree of glowing lines embedded in the invisible surface they stood on. Kit wandered over to Nita. “You okay now?” he said.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. I got past it.” She folded her arms, hugging her manual to her. “It’s just … Ronan. Sometimes he sounds so normal.”

“Sometimes,” Kit said.

“But then without warning he gets edgy again.”

“So? Where he’s concerned, so do you,” Kit said.

Nita looked at him. “What?”

Kit shrugged. “You should see your face sometimes. It’s a real ‘You get on my nerves but I can’t take my eyes off you’ kind of look.”

Nita’s expression went suddenly exasperated. “There wasn’t anything like
that
going on with us,” she said.

“But there could have been.”

“Like what? He’s about a million years older than me!” Nita said.

“Two,” Kit said.

“Two million?”

“Two years older than you,” Kit said.

Nita looked less exasperated and more befuddled. “Your point being…?”

Kit took a breath. “You kissed him,” Kit said.

Nita briefly looked shocked. Then she rolled her eyes. “That was
all
I did.”

“I know that!”

“Yeah? And how, exactly?”

This, by itself, was almost enough to stop Kit cold. Wizards who worked closely together sometimes overheard things going on in each other’s heads that hadn’t been specifically “sent” by the other party. It was an occupational hazard … and a sign of their closeness.
But this is as far as I’ve ever gotten along this line with her,
Kit thought, miserable,
and if I give up now, I may never have the guts to bring it up again! Or the time—

He opened his mouth. “Look, never mind, I can guess,” Nita muttered, and turned away. “Anyway, you know it’s true. And it just
happened.
It was just— He was—
I
don’t know. So vulnerable right then. You see how he is usually! Ronan being vulnerable—it’s kind of an attention-getter.”

She really did sound embarrassed.
Back out of this slowly while you can,
said some unusually nervous part of Kit’s brain.

“But I do feel a little better about him generally,” Nita said. “If I was feeling a little paranoid about him, maybe it was left over from the last time someone I trusted was being overshadowed by the Lone One. It’s not like Ronan can be overshadowed while he’s got the One’s Champion inside him.”

“As far as we know,” Kit said. “But a lot of things aren’t working the way they usually do.”

“Oh, don’t
you
get paranoid now,” Nita said. “Remember how it was with Ronan before, when he just wanted the Champion to fall asleep or go away? Now at least the two of them seem to be working together. We ought to be really grateful, because we’re all going to need that.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Kit let out a long breath, feeling relieved. But Nita glanced back at him, and the smile she was wearing was distinctly odd. “What?” Kit said.

“Uh, nothing serious,” Nita said. The smile started to turn into a grin. “I was just thinking about Carmela.”

“Filif got a little too close to the original there,” Kit said, passing a hand over his eyes.

Nita snickered. “Not that. I was thinking that when we get back, somebody’d better make sure she knows exactly what she’s getting into.”

“With what? Ronan?”

“Yeah.”

Kit raised his eyebrows. “You mean we should
tell
her that being hot on Ronan is actually being hot on both a cranky Celto-Goth hottie and a Senior Power-That-Is who spent most of the past ten years living on Earth and wearing a macaw costume?”

Nita looked at him.

“Nah,” Kit said at last. “Let’s not say anything. Let’s just let it play out.” And then Kit broke up laughing.

Nita’s look grew annoyed. “You’re
enjoying
the idea,” she said.

“Oh yeah!” Kit managed to say. It took a while to get control of his laughter.

“If she realizes that you’re letting her walk into this without a warning just for your own amusement,” Nita said, “the universe being destroyed is going to come as a
relief.
”

Kit wiped his eyes, forcibly smothering the last few laughs. “Look,” he said, “when we get back, if he hangs around for very long, Ronan’ll have to tell her. Assuming she doesn’t figure it out herself, somehow. She’s been figuring out way too much lately.”

Nita suddenly looked concerned. “You don’t think she’s going to pull a late-onset Ordeal on us?”

Kit shook his head. “She’s too old. But even if she
is
getting good with the Speech, you won’t find me complaining. I’d rather have her the way she is than like my other sister.”

“Oh, please,” Nita said. “Helena and your ‘deal with the devil.’ What a laugh.”

“I can’t believe she could even
think
I’d do something like that. You live with somebody all your life and then—” Kit threw his hands in the air, let them fall again, a helpless gesture.

Ronan appeared off to one side of their hardened-space platform. “I’ve got just the thing,” he said, coming over to them. “There’s a big stony outcrop a couple of miles from the end of the tunnels of the biggest city.”

“So what did you find?” Nita said. “Caves?”

Ronan nodded. “A big bubble cavern with no connection to the city tunnels,” he said. “But there’s plenty of room there for all our pup tents, and no surface access of any size; no one’s going to come sneaking up on us.” He glanced over at Nita. “You want to call your dad now?”

“Yeah,” Nita said, and got out her phone. “Feed the cave coordinates to our manuals, huh?”

“And to me,” Sker’ret said. “I’ll want them for the short-term transits.”

Ronan headed over to where Sker’ret was working with Filif on the spell diagrams. As Nita dialed her phone, Ponch got up from where he’d been lying and ambled over to Kit, his tail swinging idly.

We’re going now?
he said.

“Yup,” Kit said.

Good. I’m hungry!

Kit reached down to scratch behind Ponch’s ears. “It’s all about dinner or playing or sleep with you, isn’t it?” he said.

Not all,
Ponch said in a slightly hurt tone of voice.
There
are
other things. Sometimes it’s about squirrels.

“Oh, great,” Nita said under her breath. “What now?”

Kit glanced over at her. Nita gave him another of those exasperated looks and hit the button that put the call on the speaker.

At the other end—the other end of the galaxy, or the universe, for all Kit knew—the phone was ringing. And ringing, and ringing, and ringing…

“Nobody’s home,” Nita muttered. She started dialing again.

“Maybe your dad’s at work?” Kit said.

“I sure hope so,” Nita said. “Not that I’m sure what time it is there.”

But when the call started to go through, that number, too, just kept ringing. After a few rings someone picked up. Kit saw Nita’s expression go a little less scared. “Hi, this is Harry Callahan—”

“Daddy! What time is it? I thought you’d be—”

“—at Callahan’s Florists,” said her dad’s voice. “Unfortunately there’s no one available in the shop to take your call right now. Our normal business hours are 8:00 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. Monday through Friday—”

Nita hung up. “Okay,” she said. “His own phone—”

She dialed again. But this time all she got was a different recorded message, a digital one. “The party you are dialing is not available at this time. Please try again later—”

Nita hung up again, starting to look upset. “This makes no sense,” she said.

“You could try getting hold of Dairine,” Kit said. “Maybe she’s heard something.”

Nita nodded, pulled her manual out, and opened the back cover, where she kept her messaging routines. “Dairine Callahan,” she said to the manual.

The back page blanked. Then a single phrase in the Speech came up out of the whiteness: “Recipient is out of ambit or in transit, and is not available. Record a message for delivery when ambit or transit status changes?”

Nita rolled her eyes. “Yeah, Dair, it’s me,” she said. “Have you heard anything from Dad? Call me back in the book as soon as you can. End message.”

The page flickered, spelled the message out in the Speech, and then blanked it. “Saved for delayed send.”

“Thanks,” Nita said. “Now get me Tom Swale or Carl Romeo, and flag it urgent.”

The back page blanked. Then a single phrase came up: “Messaging in abeyance.”

“‘In abeyance’?” Nita said. “What’s
that
mean?”

“And not even any ‘Try again later,’” Kit muttered. “What’s going
on
back there?”

Nita shook her head, closed her manual, and picked up her phone again. She punched in the number for Tom’s house, hit the speaker button again. Once again the dialing tone tinkled through its usual sequence, followed by a long silence.

Nita almost hung up, but at last the phone at the other end started ringing. And it rang, and rang, and rang…

She let out a long breath, hung up.